Inconsequential
by whisperwhisk
Summary: Four families around the world, each connected to one of the four fated families, acquire early copies of a game called Sburb. For each, it presents a unique challenge. As these four families prepare to enter, one thing becomes clearer and clearer: they are not welcome. Exactly four people were meant to play Sburb, and the game doesn't take kindly to stowaways...
1. I have seen proof that fate (Frag 1)

4

_I have seen proof that fate _(Frag. 1)

Gray light filtered through the car's window and rain pelted the roof like bullets. Melanie Timbal nestled into the leather passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt. At six o'clock, a mere five hours from now, she would be out of this backwater and back in New York. New York proper. Upstate didn't count, not least the middle of the Adirondacks. Built over a waterfall, the house at the end of the drive was a blocky Frank Lloyd Wright ripoff with a small observatory built into the back, the rainy sky painting its white walls gray. The SkaiaNet laboratory where Mom and Ms. Lalonde worked, a gray box of a building with the green spirograph company logo painted on the side, loomed over the thick forest behind it. This was a national park. It was supposed to be illegal to build here, not that that mattered to Ms. Lalonde. The woman always made a show of ignoring rules, and her daughter Rose, whom Melanie had just spent the entire weekend trying to avoid, was no different.

This little visit was nothing unusual. Mom had been taking Melanie up here since she was too young to know the difference between Rose Lalonde and a "friend" who is just a bit better than you at just about everything you can imagine, and knows it, and makes sure _you_ know it, and won't ever stop reminding you. In fact, Melanie was still too young to know the difference between Rose Lalonde and that kind of "friend". Because there was no difference between the two. That was the joke. Melanie giggled a bit to herself in her seat.

At least it was Monday. At least she could finally leave.

Melanie looked out the drenched window. Mom and Ms. Lalonde were still talking, obscured by sheets of rain. Mom was short and tan and had wavy black hair, and Ms. Lalonde was tall and blonde and pale as they come. They both wore the kind of tight-fitting white lab coats that Ms. Lalonde favored, the kind that showed off the bust and hips and that no real scientist would touch, mad or otherwise. Their scarves even matched. They huddled together under Ms. Lalonde's black umbrella, held by Mom. Ms. Lalonde held in her black-gloved hand a martini, probably made by Mom. It was a going-away present, Melanie guessed, like they were pretending that a martini was a rare sight in this house, or that Ms. Lalonde's black-gloved hand ever held anything _but_ a martini.

Melanie opened the yellow car door and slammed it shut as loud as she could. Her mom glanced over just long enough to let Melanie know she'd caught the gesture, ignored it, and returned to her conversation.

This was getting ridiculous. Mom and Mrs. Lalonde had been talking for almost ten minutes, their voices muffled by the rain. Whatever they were saying, the discussion had grown somber – and now it stopped. Ms. Lalonde rummaged in her purse one-handed, balancing the martini in the other. She drew a manila folder and held it out for Mom. Mom reached out her hand to grab it, then hesitated. For a moment, both women's hands rested on the folder, and they stared at each other's faces. The bleak expressions on their faces might have seemed significant if the exchange weren't such an obvious trick to waste time.

After a moment of silent staring, Mom took the envelopes and tucked them into her coat. She and Ms. Lalonde kissed each other's cheeks, and she handed off the umbrella and walked toward the car. Finally. Soaked by rain, she strode on, her heels clicking on the driveway in a measured, confident pace.

"Wait!" shouted Ms. Lalonde, her voice still slurred. She dropped her umbrella, her martini, and one of her two designer heels, and made a drunken run down the driveway toward Mom. She threw herself into Mom's arms, and the two embraced in the rain so tight it looked like it hurt.

After a long time, Mom released Ms. Lalonde. She turned on her heel, stiffened her back, and walked back to the car. "Goodbye, Roxy," she called over her shoulder.

"G'bye, Elaine," called Ms. Lalonde.

She opened the door and sat in the driver's seat, drawing the folder out of her coat and setting it on the dash before tossing the soaking thing into the back seat.

"Can we go now?" said Melanie.

Mom looked down the driveway at Ms. Lalonde, who still stood out in the rain, watching them. "Hold this, dear," she said, picking up the folder and handing it to Melanie. It was taped shut on the sides. The tab read _BETA: Timbal, E. A_. There was a red stamp on the folder that said _DO NOT OPEN BEFORE: 4-13-09_. That was today.

Melanie hesitated, but took it. Dealing with Mom was like living on a script, and anything unexpected could result in disaster. By touch, Melanie could tell the folder contained a paperback booklet and a few hard, thin objects. "Why am I holding this?"

"It's important. Be very careful with it."

"Sure," said Melanie in her most convincing voice.

Mom turned toward her and clasped her hands, staring at her with dark brown eyes stained just the slightest bit pink. "Dear. Those envelopes contain a pair of very important discs. I need you to take care of them. Make sure they stay safe."

"Just like you took care of Dad's vase?" That comment was just a bit too far off the script, and Melanie regretted it the moment it passed her lips.

Mom jammed the car key into the ignition and gave it an aggressive twist. The car screeched in complaint and fell silent, and her hand jumped away, jittering, flustered. "Melanie, there is not time for this. Be quiet and _hold that folder_." She turned the key as if it were made of spun glass and the car purred to life. Mom would sooner be party to global annihilation than damage that car. It was some vintage Chevrolet, painted bright yellow, from one of those periods in American history that car aficionados wanted back and everyone else was glad to be gone. It was bullshit.

After five minutes of silent driving down a wooded country road, Melanie realized she was still holding the folder. "Why do we always have to go up there?" she said, breaking the silence.

"We go up once every month and a half," said Mom. "That is hardly 'always'."

"Don't dodge the question."

Mom kept her eyes on the road. She didn't answer.

"You've been taking me there for longer than I can remember, but you never even tell me why I have to go. Dad doesn't have to go. Why should-"

Mom swallowed. "Melanie, I-"

"And why do I have to do all those tests every time we come here? Strapping me into a chair and making me solve puzzles. Electrodes on my head. It's like something out of bad psych research from the 60s!"

"Melanie!" Mom snapped.

"What!" she snapped right back.

Mom swallowed and composed herself. "_Flowers for Algernon_ would make a better simile."

Melanie blinked. "Flowers for what?"

Mom shook her head. "It…" she said, trying to phrase the sentence without using a contraction. Mom hated contractions. "It's fiction," she said, giving up.

"Oh." Perfect Rose Lalonde _loved_ fiction. Melanie had tried reading fiction at Rose's suggestion. She'd tried for years. She'd started with the horror and fantasy Rose favored, then moved on to historical novels at her mom's suggestion. She had then tried out classical American literature, classical British literature, science fiction, and children's books. What a waste of time. Mom had then given her an even subtler suggestion that if she didn't find anything beyond the real world to concern herself with, then she would never learn anything properly.

"Though I suppose _Flowers for Algernon_ is not a great comparison either. Sweetie," she said. "I am so sorry. There is so much I should have told you."

Melanie said nothing. Mom was a thinker, a planner, but she didn't know how to deal with the unexpected. There was no script for this.

"You were part of all this," Mom continued. Her sodden hair covered her face. "The key to it all. And I should have prepared you. I should have filled you in on it. I just…I never made the plans."

Melanie said nothing again. Neither did Mom, though she swallowed hard. Judging by her silence, Mom was just as out of her depth as—

_BOOM._

There was a flash of blinding white light and an enormous noise, a noise that pulsed through Melanie's entire body. The entire car shook, and Melanie ducked down – or was knocked down. She tucked her head under her hands. From outside ahead the car, there was a screech, and then series of crashing noises – one, then another. The car swerved, left, right, and left again, tossing Melanie back and forth on her seat. An enormous buzzing noise filled her ears and everything between them. She couldn't see, couldn't hear. _Down_ changed from moment to moment with each sway of the car. The world spun, and her thoughts came slow and thick. Mom was saying something, shouting, but the words were garbled, as if underwater. She quivered and tried to rise, but the world tilted. She tried again, clawed her way up the seat back, but the car lurched forward, tilted, and jerked back, setting the world spinning. Melanie went back down.

After a moment, Melanie exhaled. It seemed to right the world; she could move her body enough to sit up and look around. Her vision returned. She was panting. The windows on the right side of the car – Melanie's side – were cracked in a web-like pattern, refracting gray light from the sky and red from the forest. She looked around. Behind them, one car had been struck by two others, blocking off two of the three lanes. Around them, most of the other cars had pulled to the side of the road and slowed to a stop, their passengers assessing damage, talking on phones, or going to help at the crash. Their own car had veered off to the left shoulder of the road. They were stopped. Next to her, Mom gripped the steering wheel, looking around wildly.

"Melanie!" shouted Mom. Though the buzzing in Melanie's head had mostly subsided, the first words that she understood still seemed distorted, far off. Mom's hands still gripped the wheel, and she was panting as hard as Melanie was.

"What…what was-" Melanie's voice shook.

"Are you hurt?" Mom was tense, controlled, though her voice seemed far away.

"WHAT WAS-"

"_Are you hurt_?"

"I think I…no, I'm fine, except my ears won't-"

Mom looked hard at her. "Where are we?" Her voice slipped into a practiced tone. She was using Melanie's normal post-test exercises as a basic way to check for brain damage. Clever.

The familiar logic of the tests grounded Melanie, pulling her back to the _now_. Normally she'd complain about them, but right now they were a comfort. "We're…" she said, shaking her head to stabilize herself. "We're on 87 South. Heading home from Lalonde's. Um…parked on the shoulder."

"Good. Alphabet, backwards."

"Z, X, Y, W, V, U, T-"

"Good enough. Basic arithmetic. Four processes. Double digits."

"Forty-eight plus eighteen is…uh…sixty-one."

"No. Again."

"Sixty…sixty-four. Sorry." The gears of Melanie's mind ground and shrieked, but they started moving again. "Seventy-two minus fifty-four is eighteen. Twelve times fifteen is one hundred eighty. Fifty-four divided by twenty-seven is two."

Mom sighed in relief. "Thank god for safety glass."

Melanie looked at the window, a spiderweb of cracked glass that still held together, and nodded. It was beautiful in a way. She tried not to think what might have happened if it hadn't been there to protect her. "The other cars stopped to help. Shouldn't we…"

"No," Mom said, bringing the car back onto the road. "It is starting. There is not much time. We need to get home and get things ready."

_It? _"You _knew _about this? This…whatever is happening?"

"I _said_ I have made some mistakes, and I will explain if you just-"

"You could have told me to get down! Or even taken a different road to avoid it!"

"_I didn't know about this exact meteor!_" A contraction. She must have been serious.

"Meteor."Melanie blinked, and glanced out the fractured window, noting with numb clarity the forest fire back at the impact site. "_This_ meteor. You said _this _meteor!"

"Melanie, the first thing you will need to understand is that working at SkaiaNet gave me a degree of insight into certain things-"

"Like _meteors_?"

"-and if we are going to live through this, I will need you to _shut up and listen to me_."

Melanie shut up and listened to her.

"And…open that folder. Carefully."

Melanie tore the tape holding the folder closed, ripping it a bit. Inside were two square brown envelopes, each containing a disc. Each envelope bore a lime-green insignia. One had SkaiaNet's round spirograph logo. The other had the image of a stylized house broken up into four separate blocks with a roof above, the top right block holding another, smaller block in its bottom left corner. The folder also contained a paperback booklet entitled _SBURB Beta: Instructions._

No. This wasn't right. _Sburb_ was an upcoming computer game, kind of like a co-op version of _The Sims _from what the ads said. And the ads were all over the place, proclaiming that the open beta version was scheduled for release today, April 13th. She had no idea why Ms. Lalonde's mysterious multinational tech company, a company with high-level security that hired scientists of all types from all around the world, would help develop a computer game, but given what she had just seen, she was willing to bear with Mom a little bit. "Why am I holding this?"

"Because the world is going to end in a few hours," said Mom. "And that game is the only way to survive it."


	2. exists, and we (Frag 2)

_Whiff._

The strike wasn't slow – that wasn't the problem. Martin's opponent used his youthful agility quite well, and his height helped. The boy's moves were practiced and precise, but he hadn't yet learned deception. Martin saw where his opponent's lunge was going the moment he lifted his right front toe from the ground, and that moment's forewarning was all Martin needed. He tilted his head to the left, and the younger man's heavy rapier sailed just past his fencing mask.

Martin's gloved right hand snapped up and wrapped around the rapier's edge, dulled for training. He pulled the blade down by his own belly and held it there, where his opponent could use it neither to strike nor to defend. With a snap of his left wrist, he brought his own Russian sabre up and around for a quick backhanded cut across his opponent's masked face. With the rapier immobilized, the boy couldn't parry, and Martin had only ever had one pupil quick enough to evade that strike. Of course, hitting that particular pupil was another matter entirely.

"Point," Martin said. His other twenty students, twelve to eighteen years old, stood in a ring around them to watch the day's final bout. They stood in the middle of the fencing hall, a broad and functional room with white walls and hardwood floors. Mirrors lined one of the walls, and a broad window in the front opened to Hythe Bridge Street, lamp-lit in the gloom of dusk.

The ring of twenty students around them gave gestures of acknowledgement. A few of them clapped lightly. They were used to seeing him trounce them, and moves like that no longer impressed them.

The blade in Martin's left hand jerked, and pain shot through his wrist. His hand snapped open, and his opponent twisted the blade, aiming its point right at Martin's gut. "Make it a double," the boy said, his Liverpool accent cheeky. Most of the onlookers clapped a bit more enthusiastically.

That gave the boy four touches to Martin's five. Martin chuckled, then rapped the young man on the top of the mask with his sabre. "Taking advantage of the master's frailty, is it?"

"Aye, sir," he said, sweeping off his mask to reveal a head of thick, sandy hair and a pale face gleaming with sweat. "We all work with what God gives us, you said. Well, God done gave me a creaky old man to fight. Right blessing, it is."

Martin laughed, a low rumbling sound, and took off his own mask. "So you've learned something finally. Well done, Charlie." Martin held both blade and mask in his right hand, and offered his left hand to shake. Charlie Baker was right-handed, and he had move his gear to the other hand to accept the shake. Martin always found small expressions of dominance like this helpful to keep the kids in line.

"Thank you, sir," said Charlie.

Martin pulled Charlie close. "Might want to check that freight train of a lunge you've got," he murmured. "It throws you right into the opponent's centre guard. Lines you right up to get skewered."

Charlie nodded and walked away. The boy was too elated from his near draw with the master to think about it, but he'd come around. Good lad, that one.

It was a shame he was about to die.

"Attend!" barked Martin.

The circle of students split, and all twenty-one moved to the front end of the classroom, arranging themselves in a double line before the front window. The clock above the window read nineteen-thirty, time for class to end. "You've all done well today. Especially on those pointwork drills," Martin said, nodding to the practice dummies lined up at the side of the hall. Most looked a woodpecker's holiday lodge. "You'll have to start missing a bit more. Wouldn't want me to need new targets, would we?" He brought his point to tickle the nose of Natalie Lowell, a short young lady in the front of the group with mousy hair. She almost didn't flinch.

The class repressed a laugh.

"Though some of you," he said, with a hard glance at Charlie Baker, "need to learn a bit of respect for the needs of your elders." Charlie gave a smile that that stretched from ear to tear. "Of course, that's more a task for your mums than it is for me."

The kids tried to stand at attention. They tried so hard. Marc Gaulois was murmuring to Nathan Sinclair, and in the back, Carol Donahue was picking something out of her hair.

"Go on, then. Go home!" he said. "Live like there's no tomorrow, or some nonsense like that."

"Sir!" they said, and broke. They swarmed over to their bags and began to change out of their gear, chatting the whole time.

In his back pocket, Martin's phone buzzed. He drew it and flipped it open. "Martin Nunsworth."

"Hey there, old man." Martin knew the voice, that tenor with a slight Texas accent that only deepened the layers of irony.

"Mr. Strider," Martin said, quietly enough so the class wouldn't hear.

A few students heard, and they whispered to the rest of the group. In seconds, each one had fallen silent, and Martin felt the weight of twenty-one adolescent eyes and forty-four adolescent ears upon his back. The kids' reaction was positively Pavlovian. They had heard the rumors about Strider. Rumors that he moved faster than the eye could follow, that his sword cleaved through other blades like paper, that he'd trounced the old man with a nothing but a puppet before he'd ever touched a sword.

The kids thought the stories were hyperbole, and Martin wasn't terribly inclined to correct them.

"Did you get my package?" Strider said.

"It arrived yesterday," said Martin. "Marie's been making sense of it."

"Good," said Strider. He took a long pause. "Everything's going down in five and a half hours. Worldwide. You think we're ready for this?"

Martin inched away from the cluster of listening students. "I don't believe anybody's ready for this," he said. The students inched closer. "You and your brother are about as close as anyone could come to it. As for Marie and myself…I honestly couldn't say."

"Yeah," said Strider. His voice was impenetrable as always, but Martin knew him. Martin could tell wistfulness when he heard it.. "Uh…is the lady there?"

"No," said Martin. "She's been staying late down in Reading. She's still working on that text they found."

"The one from the island?"

"Yes," said Martin. "Still the same one."

"Huh," he said, then paused. "That's cool. Say hi to her for me."

"I will," said Martin. "I've just got to finish up my dealings with these little scamps first."

"You still teach?"

"What is life without direction? Without legacy?" said Martin. "I teach because-"

"Pops, I feel a speech coming on, and the time I got for that ain't nil. Clock's winding down, tick tock, and you got to be ready to rock, ready to-"

"Go and stuff it, you hypocrite. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some children to bid goodnight." Martin turned to the class, moved the phone away from his face and called, "Will everybody bid Mr. Strider a fond farewell!"

"Good evening, Mr. Strider," the class. Their voice resembled a chorus in the same way a traffic jam resembled motor sport: it was technically the same activity, and any other remarks might be construed as disparaging.

Strider laughed. "Sound like good kids to me. Damn shame about tonight."

Martin looked at the class. Every single student stared at him in unabashed awe. "It certainly is."

"Anyway, I gotta go prep. Catch you later, old man."

"I hope you do," said Martin.

Strider hung up.

The class stood and stared. Martin shut his phone, and in the silent hall he almost heard the tiny sound echo. He put his phone back into his pocket. The class was still staring. "Well?"

The class kept on staring.

"Get on home, then," he said. "You all have families, right?"

"Not me, sir," said Maggie North, a slight girl with curly black hair. "I stabbed my mam just this morning."

"Better get to burying her, then!" said Justin MacNair, a tan boy with a moustache. He nudged her with his elbow.

"Oh, get out!" said Martin, setting the kids to packing up. Though it wouldn't matter, he began to shut the studio down for the last time. It was rote, comforting. He collected the equipment and sorted it: blades, gloves, masks, anything else he'd lent out to one of the poorer students. Each went into the storeroom in the back, which he locked. As he sorted the gear, the students filed out, one by one. Lowell. Daniels. Sinclair. Gaulois. Bellini. He tried not to watch them on their way out. It wouldn't do to have them suspicious. Like Strider had said, they were good kids. The best Martin could do for them at this point was to give them one last peaceful evening with their families. Ignorance, bliss, and all that.

When Martin got out of the storeroom, Charlie Baker still stood by the door. "What are you still doing here?" he said.

"Just wanted to thank you for the bout is all."

"You've already done that, but I suppose I won't turn down appreciation," said Martin, walking across the floor toward him. "You're welcome. You did well."

"You said that before," said Charlie. "But thanks again. Oh. Also-"

"And here comes the flood."

"Nothing so big as that. My fam's taking me up to York this weekend. Just thought you should know I won't be making Thursday class."

"Thank you for telling me, Charlie." He headed toward the door, and Charlie followed.

"Oh, by the way, sir. Don't mind my listening, but I heard you talking with Mr. Strider about getting ready for something. Is it…"

Martin held the door open for the boy. "Just go spend some time with your family. Watch a film or something."

"…private. It's private," Charlie stammered. "Okay, I get that." He moved through the door past Martin, out into the cloudy night and the lamp-lit streets of Oxford. "Good night, sir!"

"Good night, Charlie," said Martin. He gave the boy a halfhearted wave, and got an enthusiastic one in return. Then another. Then one more before Charlie finally turned the corner. "It has been wonderful," Martin said to himself.

He was quite certain the streetlamps hadn't grown hazy. He was sure it was just his eyes. He gave them a bit of a wipe with his kerchief, which cleared things up nicely.

Martin headed back inside and reached for the light switch by the door. Yes, they _were_ good kids. He would miss them quite a lot.

He flipped the switch. The hall went dark.

It was such a shame.


	3. are not (Frag 3)

The computer screen was the brightest light in the office, and its pale light revealed the half cup of cold coffee on the desk. Alok Misra stared at the SkyAir Distribution shipping register on the screen. It was a spreadsheet tens of thousands of cells long, and displayed the Bangalore-based company's entire set of delivery schedules from April 7th, 2009 through April 14th, 2009. The deliveries went out to India, Australia, and every country between the two. Each row contained a serial number, a location, and detailed information about the status of the delivery. There was only one product, and most units had already been delivered. The product was a game.

Alok's eyelids drooped. It was 24:34 on April 14th, 17 seconds into the minute. Alok had been here since 10:07 on the 13th, with a few breaks for physical necessities. The room dimmed. It dimmed, and then it tilted. And then it grew dark.

His eyes snapped open and his head snapped up from his shoulder. It was 24:36. The register had shifted. It updated with new information every five minutes, and it was Alok's responsibility to keep an eye on it and address any problems as they occurred. With a sharp breath, he willed himself into focus, invoked Ganesha for a blessing of intellect, and downed the coffee in a gulp. It was cold and bitter, a shock to his senses. Just what he needed. He banished the fatigue and scanned the register. Most incomplete deliveries had some sort of update: many were just nominal reports to verify that the handlers weren't sleeping on the job; a few had new information regarding holdups, progress, and the like. Some had been completed. Every single row had some kind of change. Every row except the last one. The only one that really mattered.

"You keep the room too dark," a voice said behind him. The lights snapped on, painfully bright. "Puts you to sleep."

Squinting, Alok looked around and the kind of cramped office typical for Bangalore. Sleek enough to look acceptable to any foreign interest who may visit, but cheap enough for India. He didn't look at the voice, but nodded acknowledgment. It was his brother Chiranjivi, three years younger. Chiran for short. He was short and muscular, with a sleek but affordable suit.

"What, no protests?" said Chiran, his cheer doing little to hide his fatigue. "No complaints that I'm 'disrupting your focus'?"

Alok continued scanning the shipping register. "No," he said.

With a sigh, Chiran padded across the room and knelt beside Alok's office chair. "How goes the register?" he said.

"Poorly," said Alok, scrolling down to the last row. "Order number 0000-0-004 still hasn't changed." Most orders had serial numbers in the form of a jumble of letters and digits, but this one was remarkably tidy. Instead of a country code, it listed a set of coordinates. Instead the usual series of status reports in an untidy mix of Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, and whatever other languages came across the register, its "Delivery Status" column held a single word. _Pending_. In English. It hadn't changed since SkaiaNet had sent the bulk distribution order on April 7th at 6:13.

The deadline was at the same precise time this morning.

Chiran took out the glasses he kept in his breast pocket and moved in for a better look so his face came right up over the arm of Alok's office chair. "Negative point nine-five-something latitude by negative seventeen-point-whatever longitude. Where is that?"

Alok switched windows to a browser with a series of map sites, all set to the same location. "It's in the Pacific Ocean," he said. "No land there. Nothing for miles. I've even hired a scout pilot. He got turned around some thirty miles from the site and had to fly back. He said something about his sensors spinning."

Chiran furrowed his brow. "What do they want us to do, drop it in the ocean?"

"I'm not certain," said Alok. He brought up a window with several satellite images of the area. "Here, examine these."

Chiran leaned in even closer, squinting. He needed new glasses. "They're blurred at the delivery location," he said. "All of them. Edited?"

"I've found no signs of Gaussian blur, pixilation, discoloration, distortion, or anything else," said Alok. "The effect appears optical."

"Optical?"

"It exists in the original photographs. No editing done."

"A magical, hidden spot of sea," said Chiran rested his head against laminate top of the desk, right next to Alok's right hand. He closed his eyes. He'd been working parallel to Alok all day, calling distribution centers, shippers, and most of all the SkaiaNet offices in America. "I'll make sure to tell the Americans that the delivery site for their most important package doesn't exist. I'm sure that will do wonders for our contract next quarter."

Alok and Chiran owned and operated SkyAir. Alok was SkyAir's brain, coordinating deliveries, handling logistics, and ensuring forms were filled properly. Because SkyAir was a subsidiary of the American technology company SkaiaNet, and it distributed to nine different countries, forms were the biggest part of his job. Alok normally had multinational team of bureaucrats to help out with the contrast. Of course, he normally didn't work at nearly one in the morning.

If Alok was SkyAir's brain, Chiran was its mouth. He arranged deals with transportation companies, connected with local salespeople, and most importantly kept the Americans happy. Today had not been a good day for the last part.

"I'm not certain why that bothers you so," said Alok. "The Americans say this game will destroy the world. If what they say is true, their lawyers will be dead long before we submit our progress report. If not, we can sue them for engaging in a contract under false terms. America has laws for that kind of thing, I believe."

Chiran opened his eyes. His face was somber for just a moment. Then he burst out laughing. "So you'll be filling out those forms in that 'afterlife' of yours."  
Alok slid back in his chair. He paused, thoughtful. "If there's no Earth to go back to, can we still return after we die?"

"I was joking," said Chiran, standing up.

"I wasn't," said Alok.

"You were joking before."

"I stopped," Alok said. "You've been talking to the Americans all week. Did you ask them why that delivery was so important?"

Chiran sat down on Alok's desk, perilously close to his mouse. His feet dangled off it, bumping into the base of Alok's chair. "They said it's 'integral to the structure and function of the game'," he said with a fake American accent. It was terrible, but Alok suspected that was the point.

"Integral," said Alok. "To the game SkaiaNet says will destroy the world."  
"Yes," said Chiran, leaning back down toward Alok.

Alok felt himself blanch. He shifted in his chair a bit, then opened his mouth deliberately. "Does that mean we could-"

"Alok. I know what you're thinking, and no."

"What do-"

"_No._"

Alok glared at Chiran. "What do you believe I am thinking?" he said. Slowly.

"You're thinking that we've been a direct party to global annihilation," said Chiran. "That we're in a position to sabotage SkaiaNet – to undo our part in it, and to save the world."

Alok opened his mouth to deny Chiran's claim, realized it was true, and closed his mouth.

"It won't work," said Chiran. "The world _will_ to be destroyed. That's what they say. The game is incidental. Meteors will start falling around six this morning. The game just tells players where and when. And it gives them a way out."

"It sounds as if you believe them," said Alok. "A bit unlike you."

Alok tried not to give away what he was thinking, even though Chiran surely knew. SkaiaNet had on several occasions displayed an alarming ability to come up with information they had no logical way to access. In July of 2007, they were assigned to ship the company some neural probes from an Australian manufacturer, and a sudden storm had delayed the shipment by a week. When Chiran called them up to inform them of the delay, ready to apologize as profusely as he would have to, they had already known – even though they had no connection to the Australian company. In fact, when Alok reexamined the shipping schedule they had handed them on January 3rd that year, he realized that they had already taken the storm into account. The fact was, SkaiaNet almost never got anything wrong. Though Alok considered himself a skeptic, their record for predicting unknown factors made their claim that this game would destroy the world uncomfortably believable. At least, as far as he was concerned.

"I don't believe them," said Chiran. He rose from his place on Alok's desk and grabbed him by the shoulders. His hands were meaty. "But they paid us up front. You saw the account."

Alok nodded, shaking off Chiran's grib. That _had _been quite a bill. Alok had sent most of his portion home, and the rest was more than enough for a comfortable life in Bangalore.

"Besides, if they're right, there is nothing we can do," Chiran said. "And if a man can do nothing to stop the end of the world, he is obligated to at least turn a profit from it."

Alok nearly smiled.

The register flickered. An update. Alok scrambled and slid his chair forward so fast he slammed his stomach against the sharp-cornered laminate desk, bumping the computer screen to an angle. Each time it refreshed, the screen returned to the top of the register. Alok had programmed it that way. It was meant to force him to read through the whole thing again each time. Right now it was a nuisance. Ignoring the pain and the off-kilter screen, Alok scrolled down to the bottom of the register. Order 0000-0-004.

_Pending._

Alok stared at the screen, almost shaking. Behind him, Chiran leaned on the back of the chair, then drooped doward. Alok stared at the single English word that sat on his screen like a stain, stubborn and unmoving. That word hadn't moved for an entire week, and Alok had no idea what to do. The package still sat in the SkyAir warehouse a few miles from the office, the only one left. Alok had tried to ship it all week, but there was nowhere to _send _the thing. There were five hours and thirty-three minutes left before time was up – presumably when the meteors started. At this point, even if Alok had a place to send the package, it wouldn't arrive on time.

Alok stared at the word. It was supposed to change. That word _had _to change so Alok could send off the order to that mysterious spot in the Pacific. So the world could play this game. So the world could escape.

_Escape_.

The last copy of the game sat in the warehouse, just a few miles away.

It could never arrive on time at this rate.

Alok froze. Chiran's breath was hot and loud behind him. The idea he'd conjured was a treasure hot from a demon's forge, a betrayal that burned in his mind.

But what other option was there? And it wasn't as if anybody _else_ was using the _Sburb_ Beta Unit 0000-0-004. No harm done.

"Chiran," said Alok.

"Yes?"

"Could you do me a favor?"

Alok's mother used to say that demons forged the most tempting of treasures.


	4. its chosen (Frag 4)

In the darkness, Valerie inhaled. The air smelled of pine and hemlock, fresh and earthy on the first dry day of spring, the sharp scent of decay below her mingling that of new life above. The breeze danced about her, strong enough to bat her tight red ponytail to and fro, but too feeble to steal her broad-brimmed park ranger's hat. The sound of wingbeats – finches, by their size and tempo – burst from the ground beside her, rushing up and into the canopy above, an eager chorus on the way to whatever new task awaited them. To her left, upon the lake, a heron called a wistful song. The breeze swirled and intensified at her right, and she turned into it, clasping the brim of her hat and breathing even deeper, sucking it in until her lungs felt ready to burst. Spring. That time of year when new buds came out to play, when bears emerged from their grottos and the wind itself–

_Thunk._

–just dropped a pinecone on her head.

Valerie opened her eyes and exhaled, slow and steady. Dusting her hat off, she looked around. The sun had cleared the crest of the mountains to the east and filtered through the canopy of evergreens onto the lakeshore. Out upon the lake, there was a small island, no more than forty feet across but still home to just a few trees. Still enough to bear life. From the trees just down the lakeshore to her left poked a small radio tower. The sun was high enough that it had completely escaped the umbra of the mountains' shade, and was completely illuminated. Eleven o'clock, by her watch. Time to go.

Valerie walked toward the path back down to her truck. Away from the wind and the water and the birds, from the rocks and the trees. From life. If only she didn't have to go back so soon! That line of thought was an obvious trap; she had things to do, and not much time to do them. But still she paused, turned, and closed her eyes for one last deep, long breath.

Why were the insides of her eyelids so bright?

In the darkness, Valerie tasted rotten hemlock.

An enormous buzzing sound filled the world, drowning out birds, breeze, everything. Valerie listened for her breath, proof that she was still alive. She felt it rising quick and sharp in her chest, but she couldn't hear it. She couldn't _hear _it. She should be able to hear her breath. Breath was proof of life, and to breathe – to feel her breath but not hear it – was wrong. Her heart beat faster, pounding through her ears, the quick beats of terror.

Valerie focused on that, isolating it as proof that she still lived – an alternative to the sound of her breath. She blocked out everything else and counted to ten by heartbeats, slowing one by one as her mind became clearer.

She moved her attention to the rest of her body. Her entire front felt like one enormous bruise. The taste of rotten hemlock, bitter and foul, filled her mouth – her face was on the ground, and the needles that made up the soil had wormed their way into her mouth. Waves of rolled over her back. Dirt filled her eyes. Her shoulders and back felt stiff, brittle. Her hat was gone. The yellow bandana she wore under it was still there. She noted each element separately, dividing them so they didn't overwhelm her. At each one, she took a bit of satisfaction. Each sensation was a sign she could get up if she ever got out of this fire. A sign of life. She rubbed her eyes, clearing them of dirt, and looked around her.

Valerie was legally blind. She didn't need her glasses to know what she saw.

A quarter of the way across the lake, the forest had been engulfed in a swimming red light. It reflected off the lake before her, giving her an odd double-image, doubled again by her own crossed eyes. Fire.

Right at the site of the radio tower.

That was rather fucking unfortunate.

Still on the ground, Valerie clapped her hands twice. _Clap-clap_. The sound split her skull like an axe through firewood, but at least she could hear. Good. She twisted her arms forward, shifting her body to push herself up off the ground. As she extended her forearm, her right shoulder exploded in pain that shot all the way up her neck and down her back. She cried out and collapsed, just managing not to fall on her wounded arm. Stars flashed in the edges of her vision. Her entire body tensed and she breathed in and out, pushing through the pain and refocusing herself. She knew this kind of pain. It was body's polite request that she discontinue the activity that caused it, coupled with a stern threat if she ignore it. Valerie had learned about all types of injuries, mostly by receiving them, and viewed such a request as more of a guideline. Her shoulder was dislocated, probably with some other damage. She'd had worse. It was when the pain stopped that it was time to get worried. As far as Valerie was concerned, if the she could move, she could function. Andrea could make a more thorough analysis later.

That didn't mean moving was the best option at the moment. Pain was a sign of life, but that didn't mean it was pleasant. Valerie reached around with her other hand and found that by some miracle, her radio was still secure in its holster. She pulled it out and turned it on purely by touch, knowing it would be quicker than trying to find her glasses.

"This is Valerie Egbert!" she shouted. "I need any station on the line! Any station! Do you copy?"

"Roger, Miss Egbert," said a very impudent, very male voice on the other line. His name was Roger. He had volunteered for radio duty just so he could make that pun. "This is Skykomish Station. What's the business?"

"I need a pickup at Nine Hour Lake. I've been-"

"Where the fuck is that?" said Roger.

"North of Preacher Mountain."

Most people would have had to check a map, but Roger just whistled. Eidetic memory. "That's a bit of a hike. Do you want that that by limousine or corporate-"

"I need Medevac!" Valerie said. The fire was creeping closer, a column of thick black smoke rising above it. "And a bucket plane."

For a short moment, Roger shut up. "Uh, wow…um. Give me just a sec."

"I'd really rather not!" It was no use; Roger had already dropped the radio. Rationally, Valerie knew that was a good thing, that Roger had put her on hold to arrange the pickup. But having someone to talk to was the best sign of life she'd had, and now it was gone. Now all she had to focus on was the pain and heard the sounds of the fire: its dull roar, the intermittent crack of splitting branches, the cries of fleeing animals. They crept closer by the moment, and sweat dripped from her forehead.

It had rained almost continually this April, and the trees were wet. In summer the blaze would have already overtaken her, but through the wet timber it moved slowly enough that Valerie might be able to escape if she could walk. With a grunt, she twisted her legs, moving them underneath her without using her arms. Her back screamed, struggled against her every move, and she screamed too, planting the balls of her feet on the ground and _shoving_. With her back protesting, standing up was harder than a hundred squats with a forty-pound weight tied around her neck, but she did it. She lifted herself up, up, rose, and straightened her back. With her head straight up, she sucked in a hard breath through clenched teeth. She looked around to a world blurred without her glasses. Behind her was the fire, and before her a blurry spot of brown that looked reasonably like the trailhead. Her legs were nearly uninjured. She set to walking.

A muscle twitch gave her just a moment's warning before her back gave out.

With the slight warning, she was able to direct her fall to the right, toward an unburnt tree at her side. She reached out to stop herself with her right arm; that collapsed too, she fell right, her dislocated shoulder slamming into the tree.

Valerie's world went white. For an endless moment she was a stone, a thoughtless stone in a blank white space. White, the color of physical pain, of agony so great it blocked out all other sensation. There was nothing but her and it. Nothing to separate her from it.

And then, there was breath. The sound of her breath returned to her first, sharp and rough, gasping. Then came her other senses. She was still standing, leaning against the tree, tears and sweat mingling on her face. Something murmured at her side, far away. Her radio?

Roger!

"-heard you screaming! What happened? Talk to me, talk to me. Please talk to me Val, please pick up your-"

"Roger," she gasped. "Roger."

"Oh God thank you," he said. "I've got a Medevac chopper heading for you, ETA ten minutes.

It was a good thing Roger was so desperate about this. Otherwise he wouldn't have missed her stealing his joke. Valerie made a note that she'd have to remember to have a laugh about it with Andrea, in the event she survived long enough. "Oh goody. I get to fly."

"Yeah, they're coming for you. Gonna lift you off like the fucking Wizard of Oz," said Roger. "Just make sure they can see you. Won't be easy, all that smoke."

"Got a flare gun."

"Remember the smoke? Spot a flare through it, I dare you. Try." said Roger.

"I'm working on it. I'm-" A blast of hot air and smoke blew her way, and she choked.

"Um. How close is that fire?"

"Shut," wheezed Valerie. "Up." She couldn't tell too well with her eyes, but judging by the heat, it was awfully close. A minute more and Nicole might want to use this part of the forest as a new pastry oven.

"Might want to get _away_ from the fire."

"Small flaw. In your plan. I can't-" Valerie gave a heaving cough.. "Can't. Walk."

"Then crawl! It'll keep you out of the smoke at least."

"Oh," said Valerie. She…probably should have thought of that. With a grunt of pain, she dropped to the ground, belly to the dirt. It was cooler down here, and much less smoky. She took a breath and steadied herself. The rocky lakeshore was just a few feet away. The reflection of the fire off the lake would probably be beautiful from this angle. If she could see it, and if it weren't about to burn her to death.

The lake!

Valerie wanted to clap her palm over her forehead, but her aching shoulder had other ideas.

Valerie fastened her radio and began to army-crawl toward the lake. It wasn't easy; her shoulders wouldn't hold any weight, so she wobbled left and right, creeping over the soft earth toward the water inch by inch.

"Valerie. You there?" said Roger.

Valerie kept crawling through the dirt. It took everything she had, and she couldn't spare the energy to reply.

"Talk to me, Val," ran Roger's mouth over the radio. "Let me know you're okay. Uh…remember last week, when I told you to go die in a fire? This may come as a surprise to you, but your actual death in an actual fire was not my intention. I was being colloquial as shit. Using a turn of phrase, meant to express a sentiment that was not literally…Oh my fucking god. It is my responsibility to ensure you can communicate, and so in my humble opinion it is my _mother fucking right_ to get some sort of reply in order to do myjob, so you can do _your _job, so I can do my…Come on, _talk _to me! Pick up the phone, press the teeny little button, and…do the thing!"

It took Valerie thirty-two breaths to reach the rocky during the pebbles of the lakeshore, and Roger talked for every single one of them. Once she got to the rocks, she paused for a breath. "Thanks," she said.

"Valerie?"

"For talking at me like that," she said.

"_At_ you?"

"Think I'll be good. I'm going to be under-"

There was a loud crack behind her. She ignored it and kept sliding forward over the smooth pebbles of the lakeshore.

"What was that?" said Roger. "Val, are you-"

"Branch snapped. Too far away to hurt. Roger, I'm going underwater."

"Oh, because drowning beats the hell out of burning alive," he said. "Actually, it does sound a bit better."

"Got my Boy Scout snorkel," she said. She pulled out a neon orange, L-shaped plastic tube. The short end was about two inches; the long end was six inches, but could telescope out to two feet.

"Oh…kay. How are they going to see you?"

Valerie untied her bandana from around her head, extended the plastic tube to its full, majestic two feet, and tied the bandana around the end. "Tell them to watch for the flag on the water. Yellow."

Roger paused. "Good luck," he said. His voice was hollow, like a preacher spreading the word for a cause long lost.

"One more thing. Call my sister. 253-412-0001. Tell her transponder number quad-zero zero double-O one is down."

"What? What were you even doing up there?"

"She'll know what it means," said Valerie. "Gotta go! Remember, yellow flag on the water!" She knew he'd remember, but it felt better saying it.

"Got it. Valerie, if-"

"Bye!" said Valerie. She dropped the radio and raised the plastic tube to her lips, her bandana dangling from the top. She sucked in a breath, closed her eyes, and slid into the water, face up.

It was _cold_.

Valerie had been swimming in mountain lakes like this before, and the first moment always felt like ice creeping in through her pores and freezing her top to bottom. She had steeled herself for that. Welcomed it.

She'd never swam in one after standing next to a forest fire.

The sudden change in temperature hit her like a physical blow. It ripped into her body, tearing her heat away, draining her. Her skin screamed. It felt ready to blister, to split and freeze and fall away. That was good, Valerie reminded herself. Pain was proof of life.

The pain started to fade as her skin grew accustomed to the temperature. And then the pain from all her other injuries – bruises, scrapes, damaged arms and back – began to fade. The cold crept into her, wiping away the pain. And then, bit by bit, wiping away every other sensation

Valerie had always supposed it was time to worry when the pain ended, but there wasn't much she could do about it at this point. She sucked air through the tube. In. Out. In. Out. She counted the breaths. A last sign of life.

In the cold and the dark, Valerie waited, and breathed.


	5. Our world has gone, and four (Frag 5)

6

_Our world has gone, and four_ (Frag. 5)

"Right now, top priority is to get everyone into the game," recited Melanie. "Each server player runs _Sburb _for a client player – that's the person who's doing the entry sequence. The game won't work otherwise. The idea is…um, we set up a loop, with each player group as client to the one before it and server to the one afterward. So the Egberts will run our game, and we'll run the game for the…what's-their-names in England."

"The Nunsworths," said Elaine. She sat at the wheel of the '75 Caprice. The constant downpour hammered the windshield and made the pavement of Interstate 87 slick, but '75 was a good model. It had power and weight to it, and the way it clung to the road felt just right. On the best days, it handled so well it might well be part of her body, its wheels her feet and its windshield her eyes, its motor her heart. Even in the rain, it sliced through the oil and rain on the road like a yacht through open water. "As a developer, I have intimate knowledge of _Sburb_'s mechanics. Why couldn't I act as a server for each group?"

"The server player has to protect the client and set things up quickly, and running the interface takes a lot of focus. So we _could _have one person running it for everyone else, but it's…not the best idea." Melanie paused, tapping her feet against the floor. "So…that's it."

"Thank you. Now-" Elaine cut short twisting the wheel to avoid an old Volkswagen Type 2. The Microbus. '68, if Elaine was right, painted an abominable shade of gold. It hid a loose pack of cars and trucks sliding down the road, skidding from lane to lane. Elaine pressed down on the pedal, rushing up to meet them.

"Will you _slow down_?" shouted Melanie. The girl's hands gripped the handle on the door.

Elaine suppressed a grin and pressed the pedal harder. Her daughter wouldn't like this one bit.

The engine roared. Elaine brought the Caprice into the pack before her, weaving between them with a grace some might consider reckless. She was a hummingbird among sparrows, trees zooming by on either side. She didn't normally let herself drive like this, but today, the 13th of April, 2009, was a special day, and time was at a premium. It was 3:00 PM. If she didn't have her family – and the entire network – ready by 7:00, it would be, as they say, game over. An appropriate, if uncomfortably literal, analogy. And a perfect excuse to use let the Caprice do what it was made to do.

A minute and one or two very near misses later, they had cleared the pack. Elaine took a deep breath. "Now, do you have any questions?"

"WHAT WAS _THAT_ ABOUT?"

"Questions about the game, please."

"Mom!" Melanie almost never used that word to address Elaine. Elaine sometimes wondered if her daughter thought of as "Mom". She was so formal for a girl so young. It was Elaine's fault. Most things in Melanie's life were. Elaine sometimes tried to blame the contract, but _she_ was the one who had taken her daughter up to the lab. Contracts are nothing without signatories to uphold them, and Elaine had done her part in that regard. She no longer doubted its necessity, but shadows of thoughts in the back of her mind still whispered that she had betrayed Melanie, fundamentally and completely. Perhaps they were right.

"If this is about my driving, I-"

"I know we're in a hurry!" said Melanie. "But if you crash on the way there, _then_ what do we do?"

Elaine had the sudden urge to slap Melanie. A vision entered her mind, an image of the future, superimposed over reality. Her hand would flick up across the girl's cheek, from the jawline to just below the eyes. Her nails were long, and would trace three small scratches where they fell. Not enough to bleed, but enough to teach the girl a lesson. One she quite needed.

_No._ Elaine's hand twitched on the steering wheel, but she kept her face straight and her voice smooth. "You are right," she said, with effort.

The sound of Melanie's jaw dropping to the floor echoed through the cab.

"Now," said Elaine. "Do you have any questions about the game?"

Melanie remained silent. The silence was sharper than any remark: it invited Elaine to imagine a host of things Melanie might have said, to feel a tiny sliver of scorn from each.

"Do you have any questions," Elaine said, "that are not inane, irrelevant, or contrary?"

"…Yeah, actually," said Melanie. The girl had never gesticulated much; much like Elaine herself, Melanie had always preferred to express herself through what she said, or more importantly, what she did not say. For instance, in Melanie's current position, most people would have their arms crossed. "Why did you have me go through that whole act of repeating everything you just told me? I know it's not just a mnemonic, like usual – it was way too thorough, especially considering we're on a time limit."

"It was a rehearsal," said Elaine.

"What, do you want me to present it at school?" said Melanie. "Are you putting the end of the world on hold so you can finally see the school play?"

Elaine did not say anything.

"I get performance anxiety. You might know that if you went to the school plays. Know what they cast me as last year?"

Elaine did not know. Nor did she say anything. She did not say anything very, very carefully.

"A rock," continued Melanie. "I was a rock. No lines at least, but I had to curl up in a ball the whole time, and Joey McGee used me as a seat. Maybe they'll let me be a meteor this year. It's a pretty similar role; all they'd have to do is set me on fire and drop me off the roof. Hey, maybe we'd even get a cameo from a real meteor! That would be fun, because with the stage blown up, I wouldn't have to stand on it."

"Melanie," said Elaine. She took a breath every few words to keep her voice steady. "Beyond memory, the reason I had you to rehearse this is because in a few hours, I will need you to explain them to several groups of strangers."

Her daughter gaped. "Mom! Why didn't you-"

"I did not tell you this was a rehearsal precisely _because _of your performance anxiety," said Elaine. "I believed your familiarity with aptitude tests would allow you better focus on the task at hand if you believed this was one."

"But you're just dumping all of this in my lap? Just like that?" said Melanie. "Couldn't _you_ explain it to them? Or maybe…I don't know…have told me before _today_? When this thing is supposed to-"

"_In addition_, I had hoped that conducting the task under familiar circumstances would help you associate it with familiarity rather than stress," said Elaine. "Had I told you earlier, you would have-"

"Yeah, a day. A week, maybe a month earlier. Sure, I'd be stressed then," said Melanie, her voice edging on panic. "But how about a year? Two years? Maybe if it had become one of those 'familiar circumstances', we wouldn't be dealing with all this!"

"I _said_ there-" Elaine's words choked in her throat. She had become too used to keeping secrets, and her very body rebelled against the idea of letting them slip. Her voice cut short, and her thought, the sentence she had planned and readied, vanished. She could not tell Melanie that. It was accounted for, but wrong. The girl was not ready. Elaine had prepared her for today since the day of the contract, but the fact was she wasn't made for it. Not like Rose Lalonde, or Ms. Egbert's nephew. By fate, Melaine would never be anything but _almost _good enough. No more, no less. She should have been allowed to be a bystander, not forced to face this. Elaine shouldn't…_should not_ have to face telling her. It was unaccounted for.

"What did you-"

With a sharp, stiff motion, Elaine held up a hand for silence.

It worked.

Elaine blinked deliberately and breathed. Her mind spun, searching for the thought she had lost, tracing backward to find it. There had been a hint in her final justification for not explaining herself, pointing toward a wall of selfish terror that stopped her from doing what needed to be done.

That would not do.

"I said there were things I should have told you years ago," Elaine said. Her voice wavered, but it was clear and strong.

"Things like?"

"Things like the purpose of SkaiaNet," said Elaine. "Things like my work there, and the reason we visited the main laboratory eight times a year since the day you were born."

"Uh," Melanie said.

Pieces of information, secrets accumulated over the last thirteen years, whirled through Elaine's mind and assembled into an outline, then filled in with descriptions and details. In just a moment, she had a near-compete speech prepared in her mind, with a bit of room left for variation. "The first thing you need to understand is that many of my actions were part of my contract with SkaiaNet. I started work at there in-"

"February, 1996," said Melanie. "Two months and a bit after my birthday."

"That's correct, dear, but please do not cut in unless you have a specific question. It's disruptive."  
Melanie grumbled something about conversation trees.

Elaine tapped her finger on the wheel, spinning through her planned description to find where she left off. "Ah, yes. SkaiaNet had an opening for a very particular position. It was listed as a game design position, but it also required management, advanced programming, and neuroscience, as well some knowledge of physics, biology, psychology, and archaeology. SkaiaNet was already infamous for vaporware, but it not only stayed afloat, but had somehow accumulated enormous resources – all of which went into this single game. No, I thought. This had to be a front for something. Something I had to be involved in, or at least figure out.

"I was only half wrong. The project _was_ a game – the same game you hold right now. It took a few years before I really believed that myself. But _Sburb_ was also the most ambitious project I had ever seen. In fact, it was the largest project of any sort in history. Unlike most people who say that sort of thing, I am not exaggerating, and I am not wrong. Roxanne and I devoted nearly every aspect of our lives to it for thirteen years, and everything we did amounted to little more than integrating the parts laid out by our predecessors. SkaiaNet has existed since 1920s for the sole purpose of producing _Sburb_. A few reports say that work on the game started even earlier than that."

"Wait, slow down." said Melanie. "_Sburb _is a computer game, right?"

Elaine pondered how to answer that one for a moment. "It is a game, and it runs on a computer."

"Okay, that was needlessly cryptic, so I'm going to ignore it," said Melanie. "Anyway, how the hell did they work on it in the '20s? Mechanical computers?"

"No. _Sburb_ is only a computer game in part. The computer game part of it, what you hold in your hand, is _Sburb_'s surface layer. That is what I worked on, mostly. It lets your computer run a user interface and connect with other players, but its most important function is to communicate with the greater part of the game. The part we call the Box."

"Well that's a bit-"

"It _is_ cryptic. As it turns out, a company whose express goal is to save the population of Earth from inevitable destruction tends toward a degree of drama in its workplace culture." Elaine paused to recover her train of thought. "The Box – short for 'Black Box' – is an enormous and indecipherable program. SkaiaNet's founder discovered most of it on an unmapped island in in the south Pacific. The island had an old ruin carved up and down with glyphs we never understood: millions of lines, all out of order, all part of one enormous program. The rest of the code was scattered around the world, all found in similar, smaller ruins. For fifty years, finding bits of code, transcribing them, putting them in order, and trying to interpret them were SkaiaNet's work. That last one never met with much success.

"Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, scattered across some of the most remote locations on Earth with no hint as to their locations. Imagine that each piece is a black square, indistinguishable from every other, and you must orient each of these indistinguishable pieces in a precise manner with the others. By comparison, our work was relatively trivial. That is not to say it was small, or easy. It merely illustrates the enormity of the task our predecessors faced."

"Wait," said Melanie. "I thought nobody knew how it worked. How did they know when they were done building it?"

Elaine chuckled. "That part was easy. The Box was completed in 1978. The older employees say that the moment all of the bits of code were arranged in proper order, the entire thing – anything bearing even a single scrap of it – vanished, replaced by a green tablet with that house emblem on it."

Melanie looked down at the envelopes in her hand. One of them bore the same emblem: a green house, broken into four squares with a smaller fifth one inside. The logo of _Sburb_. "And you just believed them?" she said. "No reasonable doubt? No skepticism?"

"Sweetie, I have seen the Box. I have worked with it, as much as anyone can work with that thing. It is…not ordinary."

"So the Box is magic," said Melanie, unsatisfied. "Just like the game. Well I suppose that explains everything! Thank you for your time."

"The Box…" Elaine paused, thinking of a to phrase her thoughts without sounding absurd. She failed to find one. "It would be more accurate to say that the Box is the source of the _Sburb_'s more esoteric-"

"Magical," said Melanie.

"_Unique _properties," said Elaine. "The fact that I cannot explain its ability to edit reality does not mean that no explanation exists."

Melanie frowned, scowled, then shrugged. Thirteen years ago, Elaine herself had learned to accept the unknown as a factor. Her own reaction had been so similar.

Elaine took a moment to relocate her preplanned description. "The Box emits an enormous number of distinct, continuous signals. It can accept and respond to unique inputs, and has unique memory for each one. This property allowed Ms. Lalonde and I to build built an interface with the Box as a foundation, one that would allow users to exploit its ability to modify reality. It was not easy. The Box could not interface with any existing intermediate language, so I built an interpreter and a compiler to get the UI to talk to it, as well as a design platform that would work with Box-compatible code. _Then_ we could build the UI.

"The Box also accepts the presence of nearby individuals as unique inputs. This makes working with it less than pleasant." Elaine felt her voice quiver. She took a slow breath, and gripped the wheel tighter. This part would be difficult. "The more time you spend near the Box, the more directly you work with it, the more the world around you…shifts. Though nothing was proven, most observers – myself included – felt a distinct sense of purpose in it, as if it were molding them to serve some unfathomable design." Her voice fell to a whisper. "Nobody was ever able to stand working closely with it for long."

Melanie took a moment to connect the dots. "You used technicians," she said. "You had them work on the Box so you didn't have to. So whatever it did would happen to them instead of someone that really mattered. That's…"

"Harsh. And necessary."

"I just don't get how you kept at it," said Melanie. Her voice grew louder. "Did you just…keep your eyes on your code? Remind yourself how 'necessary' those technicians were? Thank them for their sacrifice in secret? How often did you have to remind yourself that it was for a 'cause', that everything was you did was worth it. That it _had _to be?"

Elaine jerked the wheel to the right and veered off the road, and the cars behind her honked and slowed. On the shoulder, she slammed the brakes. The tires screamed against the pavement, and the Caprice lurched to a halt. Elaine leaned forward, her forearms against the wheel. She closed her eyes, shaking. For thirteen years, she had made herself forget what had to happen for her work to continue – at least, the parts she wasn't directly involved in. The parts concerning Melanie. She had to forget the sacrifices, the technicians who had muttered about arms coming out of the wall, objects moving of their own accord. The ones who had resigned, or gone into a psych ward, or simply vanished. She had to focus on the work itself. It had been necessary. It was _still_ necessary. And her shortsighted, self-righteous brat of a daughter had just made it impossible.

"I'm right," said Melanie. "You really did think your-"

Elaine's right hand snapped up and clamped over the girl's mouth. "Melanie! _Do. Not. Judge. Me._" She took a breath and loosened her grip. "And when you do, for the sake of our own survival, _keep it to yourself_."

Melanie froze, then slowly moved her hand up. She put it on Elaine's and removed it from her mouth, then placed it in her lap.

Elaine wiped her eyes with her left hand. "When I say the things I did were necessary, I am not exaggerating, and I am not wrong. But by no means does that make those things right." She gave Melanie's hand a squeeze. Melanie hesitated, but returned it. "I do not need your acceptance, but I do need your understanding and your cooperation."

"How do you know-" Melanie interrupted herself, then continued more quietly. "How do you know you're right? You said the Box could influence people's environments, you implied it could change their thoughts. How do you know it didn't think all this up for you?"

"I don't," said Elaine. She withdrew her hand, straightened her back, and flicked her dark, curly hair out of her eyes. She pulled up the cuffs on her lab coat. "I have no way to know that the Box does not influence my actions. That fact has worried me for years."

Melanie did not say anything to that. In the quiet car, the pounding of the rain became a low roar that mingled with the hum of the motor. Elaine listened to it for a moment. She checked for oncoming traffic, pressed the gas, and brought the car back on the road.

"So," said Melanie after a full minute of driving. Her voice was full of forced cheer. "Uh. Could we talk about why I always had to come to-"

"Could we not? "

Melanie scowled. "I guess."

"We will, dear. I promise," said Elaine. "But not now. But there were reasons that I could not tell you earlier. Good reasons."

Melanie nodded, unsatisfied but accepting. "So…that rehearsal. Pretending it was a test," she said. "If it was a test, if that was true…how would I have done?"

Elaine relaxed, grateful for the chance to talk about something else. Giving Melanie extra practice was just a bonus. "Your explanation was terse, and mildly disorganized."

"Is that-"

"The brevity was good," Elaine said, checking the clock. It was 3:30. She pressed the gas a bit harder. "Work on your organization. I'll give you one minute to prepare yourself. Ready?"

"Ready."

"Begin."

As Melanie prepared herself to explain _Sburb_ once again, Elaine readied herself for a far more difficult explanation.

The explanation of how she had betrayed her daughter.


End file.
